I Kurdistan These Stupid Puns Anymore

To Those About To Read, I Salute You

In this edition, I describe the actual process of expatriating, define relatability and realism in all things, fabricate emotional depth while describing the oil industry as a whole, and make too many jokes about sheep-love.  I sincerely hope you enjoy reading this.  Thank you for your attention.

I work for an energy services company.  We are run by a mafia of middle-aged white men diabolically plotting from an offshore volcano lair.  While stroking his equally evil cat, the chairman noticed I submitted a vacation request, and the blonde babe accessory to it, and immediately began cackling with delight.

"This is just what we've been waiting for!  This young man has optimism, others are enjoying his company, and he just completed a great project for Technology.  Let's punch him in the dick!"

So it's off to the Kurdistan on 72 hours notice.  Again.

First, the backstory.  Oil is now cheap.  Saudi Arabia is executing a global economic cockblock of unprecedented proportion.  They're doing so by turning their production spigot to "wide open," flooding the market with sweet, delicious crude oil and driving the price down.  It's working.  They can do this because dinosaurs were either A) all Muslim and on pilgrimage when the meteor struck or B) assholes (not mutually exclusive). A comical proportion of the world's easily accessible oil is buried in the Saudi Sandbox.

Figure 1 - Well, Shit

As an offshoot of this, the industry has collapsed into itself like external genitalia during a Swedish Fjord plunge (sounds dirty, actually isn't). In October 2014, 38 rigs operated in the Kurdish Autonomous Region.  In October 2015, there are 3. Layoffs have been widespread and rapid. The lack of imported Scotsmen, Canadians and Aussies is accordingly conspicuous.  And you can hardly hear yourself think over the audible sighs of relief from the local sheep population.

Figure 2 - Buy Her Another Drink, Try Again in an Hour

Enter: Rusty.  Got no trained operators still on the payroll?  Send the Technology guy!

To get to Kurdyland, one has a number of options.  Note that there are no good options involving this final destination. My preference, akin to preferring rectal thermometry to slamming my junk in a window, is to fly Emirates from DFW to Dubai, then Dubai to Erbil (Irbil, Arbil).  Emirates, it seems, makes an ungodly sum of money.  They tend to provide clean, 2/3 empty planes with bottomless booze on all flights.  Their flight attendants also somehow manage to be attractive and vaguely Arabic-garment-clad, a confusing juxtaposition. It's weird, but I like it (not mutually exclusive).

To get to Dubai, you pass through the following countries' airspace: Canada, Greenland, Sweden, Finland, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Romania, Iran and Syria.  This doesn't make any dad gum sense, until it does.  That's because two-dimensional maps lie to you with their East-to-West cleanliness.  On a globe, the fastest way from point A to point B doesn't give any regard to cartographic convention - look at a globe from above (as shown below) it then the "ohhhhh" will hit you.

Figure 3 - More "Oh"s Than a Box of Fruit Loops

The niftiness of this navigational trick placated and amused me for roughly ten minutes, then reality set in that I was once again going back to Kurdistan, and I drank a lot.  Drinking is good (citation needed).

Once in Dubai, I was immediately, consistently reminded that I am poor.  Dubai is a strange place.  Shopping, the national sport, dominates life.  I was honestly unaware of the variety of brands of watches, sunglasses, hookah-smoking accessories and superfluous status symbol haberdashery which existed in the world.  Thankfully they all exist in the arrival terminal in DXB, and the holes in my cultural awareness were spackled in one swell foop.

Figure 4 - Coming Soon: Character, Subtlety, Soul

Fast forward a few more meals served on trays, and I arrived in Erbil, the Las Vegas of Iraq.  An unnecessarily well-dressed and immaculately mustachioed driver greeted me and stared disapprovingly at my stained t-shirt and grey hoodie. He then escorted me to his car with the same shameful "don't judge me based on him" attitude I encountered 1,000 times while at SMU. Human worth in Kurdistan varies directly with quality of shoe leather, tightness of pants and is inversely proportional to time since last haircut.  My personal hell.

En route, he alternated between some Avicii-esque untz untz music and locally produced tunes featuring a tortured cat and some bongos.  This leads into my first Potentially Offensive, On-Point Occupational Observation (POOPOO): Music is enjoyed as a function of its specificity to the listener. This is why club music is a global fixture in clubs and dance bars - you don't actually give a rip about the music there, you want a background beat to dance and/or air hump while pretending to be interested in what some cute German girl is saying.  Most 20-somethings on this planet have heard "Levels" a thousand times because most of us are interested in pretending to care about cute German girls.  But you can only identify with details.  Avicii provides no details because none are needed.  I don't care about Kurdyland's Finest because I don't get the details.  But I LOVE  Bob Schneider because his details are like my details and I get it.  That's why I write about the details of these ridiculous trips I go on.  Because I want to be known, understood, accepted.  And only details can create this bond between share-er and share-ee.

Figure 5 - I Love This Song!

I digress.

We then arrived at the staff house, a microcosm of Kurdistan and much of the Middle East.  It was lavishly decorated, populated by oilfield expats who abused it, rotted in the foundation and infested with rodents and bugs. It also stank of unattended sewage backflow.  The ratio of effort put into the decor compared to essential structural elements, pest control, and sanitation was comical. But the chandeliers really tied the living room together.  Welcome to Erbil.

Then we worked.  Boy did we ever work.  Turns out oil is reluctant to flow from subterranean reservoirs in commercial quantity and quality (citation needed).  Whoda thunk.

This work was a constant team effort, and leads seamlessly into my second Kurdy POOPOO.  In the oil patch, the folks you work with are both the source of addiction and the support group to fight it.  No one in the world understands the life of a commuting rotation worker except other commuting rotation workers. So when we're on location, we all get it.  We're here for each other.  The witty bullshit and technical vernacular defy description, and the creative dick jokes flow like... um, like an oil well.  Sometimes.  We're the only ones who truly get each other, and when we're here, it's a big happy, diverse, shamelessly dysfunctional family.  My crew represented BFE Michigan, Basra (Iraq), Atlanta (Not Iraq but close), Romania, Libya, Nigeria, Tunisia, Malaysia, Egypt and Colombia on this hitch.  We collectively bro'ed our faces off, covering such important topics as the funniest movie title if it were actually about a vagina (Frozen, Home Alone) and whether or not it counts as peeing in the pool if there's no water in it (it does).

Figure 6, 7 - Oh My Squad

The third POOPOO came into light as a dingleberry trailing stubbornly off the second.  While rotation workers get it, and get each other, our significant others never get the same support group.  While we're away from home, we're constantly in the company of other people away from home.  Those we care about who we leave behind, however, don't get to just take a month and commiserate with folks missing their conjugate sexy pieces of dude-shwarma.  Because rotation workers tend to live in awesome places not commonly associated with the oil patch, there's no support group or meeting place.  They just go a month at a time without shwarma.  Which is awful. Oilfield WAGs have a hard gig and deserve more support and respect than they often receive.

Figure 8 - C'mon, I Had To

At the risk of trailing off into an existential description of rotational life, allow me to end on a happy conclusion.  While being far from home isn't easy, it's a growth opportunity which I encourage everyone to try.  Working with people who aren't from the "right" fraternity, neighborhood, country, or religious background is an absolute pre-req to internalizing the fact that none of those things even exist.  While missing birthdays, holidays, vacations, football seasons and volleyball games seems like the pits at times, getting covered in grease and learning how to swear in multiple languages truly is chicken soup for the soul.  It renders me appreciative of what I have, eager to spend time with loved ones, and as most of my friends know, it makes me completely full of POOPOO.

Figure 9 - ...YUP...

Thanks for reading, everyone.  See you soon.